Elanso

I wish it weren't so. Who wants to be in a cheesy B-grade Western? But SL needs sheriffs while it is in the wild frontier stage, not lawyers. Regrettably, there's never a shortage of law students and new lawyers coming up with ideas for how to bring law to SL -- obviously unburdened by any significant field experience in SL. The latest is posted here and naturally Morally Blind is agog about it and Ashcroft is all over the comments like a cheap suit.Sure, it would be nice if Second Life were like, oh, an NPR show. The well-rounded and measured diction of well-meaning liberals, wringing their hands about crime issues mainly abstract to them, never felt and lived. The nuanced and wise discourse with nary a discouraging word, the soft, gently-worn clothing in rustic hues, the recycling, the few, if any, carbon emissions -- and of course, green tea in some sort of fusion with soy, preferably organic. Thoughtful frowns and relaxed poses on Zen cushions in a sim like Supportforhealing... Who couldn't agree to have the rule of law and courts and lawyers in that setting?! Just make sure green tea doesn't make you sick to your stomach...It would be great if everyone would agree when they signed on that they would be willing to pay, oh, $72 Lindens a month into a kitty to ensure "justice" if any sort of dispute or actual violation came about. You know, trees waving into my next door neighbour's house, and a no-show or even stubborn sim-sharer who refused to move the tree...Hey, that's a $144 fine for you, bub...The problem with these nice visions of Second Life law is that there aren't the *subjects* available to enact this pretty picture. There isn't a community of people who have voluntarily and democratically -- and *liberally-democratically* agreed to have the Rule of Law -- except if you count the TOS, which is more like a Writ enforced by the King's bailiff.Sure, everyone signs the TOS, but there is only one power that can enforce the Big Six Community Standards against hate and griefing through permanent banishment. And yet, powerful though it is, this Power cannot help you if your design is stolen, if your good name libelled, if your tenants driven out by ugly texture particle bombs.Unfortunately, temporary banning or permanent banishment are all that avatars understand -- being hunted down and captured by a sheriff. Little else affects them. You can't imprison them -- they fly away. Most of them don't own land -- you can't impound it. Schemes involving land seizure can work only with land-holders who already by definition aren't the kind of people who are going to suddenly stir and rape you in the night and scatter ugly Tub Girl pictures all over your sim. Avatars aren't even shameable -- they know no shame, for the most part, being anonymous extensions of selves without names displayed, and they mute or ban you if you try a shame campaign on them. You can't negrate anymore -- that was a powerful weapon, and one misused, so the Lindens nerfed it. SL is big enough and sprawling enough that public shame campaigns would require literally hundreds of dollars (US) to get on the classifieds -- which not everyone reads. It's awfully hard to get a name and shame campaign going on forums that construe such efforts as "personal attacks" that aren't allowed.So I'd like to think that SL could have something dignified, refined, wise -- but it's not possible.A REALLY bad idea is to take Justice Soothsayer's stand-alone Supreme Court and turn that into some sort of "appeals lodge". If anything, it should be fire-bombed if it goes off and starts acting on its own like that! There is nothing more hideous to conceive that these branches of government that are supposed to work in concert, with checks and balances, lurching off on their own, appearing as monstrous, hypertrophied artifacts in the surreality of virtuality. This Supreme Court in SL represents nothing; it has no judges appointed by an executive or elected by a parliament or people; there is nothing to restrain it (which is why Ashcroft's judicial adventure was such a horror). You have to have real separation of powers (not strange things like the executive-like "parliament" of the Scientific Council of Neualtenberg). Seriously, this stuff just can't be pitched into SL to work by itself -- there has to be a government by the people and for the people and OF the people before there can be a court. And who wants other residents to rule over them???Why is it that the kids always want to play cops, spies, and courts *first* and not bother with the other "trappings" of government? Answer: they aren't as cool, and are a lot more work.Any system that hinged on people paying into it can't possibly work except for those already law-abiding enough to...pay into a justice system.First of all, these systems rapidly become bureaucratic, non-functioning, and even paralyzed. For example, in theory, I could take such a case to this e-justice outfit that the Portugese government started with Gwyn Llewelyn in tow in SL. Indeed, I *did* take such a case! Except...it's completely non-functional. I filed a case that I thought was a good one. A former tenant, angered that he was reprimanded for harassing another tenant began to terror-form the whole sim, ruining many people's days of hard landscaping work. I applied to the court for a modest $7500 for an hour's time of clean-up, which I hoped to divide among the victims. I thought if the amount was low, and the repondent somebody who wasn't an alt, not a habitual griefer, and still inworld with a business, that he'd be a good candidate to try to get to "play court with". But first he would have to be served, and this hapless e-justice seemed to boggle just on my email address creating an error in their system for having capitals in it, and even when adjusted, still not functioning...Let's assume they got over their bureaucratic foibles and served the guy. He might laugh. I certainly wouldn't be able to get him to pay unless the Lindens had a pre-arranged agreement to garnish wages after rulings were delivered by certain e-courts. Can you imagine them doing that? I can't...Picture the famous penising incident. This alt was actually made using my email, and I became aware of it when my email came in telling me "Welcome to Second Life!" My ID was spoofed, grabbed for this purpose -- it occurred immediately after that nasty phone call to my real life home by Plastic Duck. It was the usual Bolshevik tactic of trying to make one person think another person was attacking them. Of course it was all fake and easily seen through. But how would you serve justice in this case? The perpetrator was already permabanned, and was using an alt. Nothing would shame him; shame would only fuel his inflated griefer's ego. In this kind of case, only having the sheriff -- the FBI, even Interpol -- go after him would work. Nothing else would. Only real-life legal force could be invoked, and that would be hard to do, as the damages you could show would likely not be enough in real-life terms to muster the case. Even so, it would have to be attempted.I regret that these legal discussions go off in such a ridiculous and useless direction as harping on the symbolism of buildings, or bits of flotsam and jetsam of somebody's idea of a legal system lodging in the rabid soil of Second Life. I also find it completely unacceptable to think you can curb griefing, which is completely outside the norm of civility, by having little civil conventions like paying fees or having land seized. Plastic Duck's alt isn't going to contribute his land to your land-seizure scheme on the moors of your genteel role-play governance sim, duh. That's why griefing *is* like terrorism and that's why you need to muster the force and the will and the complexity of measures against it just as you would terrorism. It doesn't do any disservice to the seriousness of real terrorism to reason *by analogy* and to see *the dynamics are similar* and to try to figure out how you would deal with this outside-the-norms-of-civility sort of crime in a virtual context. How can you catch and punish those who won't show up in court?Something I find touching in the UCLA brief's writer is her absolute unfamiliarity (or lack of reflection about) the exigencies of Second Life. The IM destroys any effort to sequester witnesses -- good luck with trying to prevent the coaching of witnesses and what the Soviets called "telephone justice"!. The problem of alts destroys many efforts to force accountability or mete out punishments. The system he envisions depends on time spent by inworld Linden adjudicators -- and they will never, ever go for that.Everyone knows that, but arrogant lawyers that they are, the Morally Blind can't help but fawn over a future one of themselves, petting him on the head for stating the obvious about how you'd play court if you were going to play court...but we're not playing court, we have real money involved, and we want real law...No, the worst offenses of Second Life, like those of the lawless frontier, for a long time to come will have to be dealt with by sheriffs, when they aren't dealt with by posses.Does that mean that we must succumb to the law of the Wild West, and follow the path laid out by the bizarre and eccentric Little Gray, who says he represents the ACLU, in urging everyone in SL just to arm themselves to the teeth and shoot griefers, since they only understand force? No, certainly not. We should keep working to get the Lindens to outlaw weapons, and keep spreading outwards safe zones and non-weapon solutions. We should keep making avatar bill of rights and constitutions and contracts and keep trying to live by rules applying to all. I know of no other way that works except to behave *as if* we will have the rule of law someday. Regrettably, those who completely crash the server will have to be apprehended by sheriffs. For other kinds of offenses, perhaps eventually, various conciliation councils might come into being and work, some mediation societies. But so far, those that have emerged have mainly been about gaining reputation by "doing good," and are not really effective.Under what circumstances could some sort of Caledonian gentlemen's law sort of set-up work? Well, when people CONSENT to have it work to settle some matter of reputation. Example: a man in the community has crossed as a female avatar and had a lesbian relationship with an unsuspecting real-life female and then is discovered -- not only to be male IRL, but to have a RL wife. Perhaps he might be shunned. Or perhaps if he were sorry he might make restitution. Perhaps he could be allowed to stay in a Caledon-like place (although this wouldn't be an offense in the current Caledon set-up) and not banned from public thoroughfares, but only from the better homes...Or perhaps someone who is a member of a Chamber of Commerce steals a keyword, a business name nad puts it in an ad. Or copies a dress design. Again, if he wishes to keep his standing in the community, perhaps he could pay restitution that would satisfy the claim.Another really typical case is the spreading of falsehoods about people. For example, somebody spreads the lie that another resident is "scamming newbies" even though there is no such occurence. The person who told the lie is forced to recant publicly, and do some kind of penance or pay a fine...But all these types of incidents require people to wish to remain in good standing in the community. And that's just it: their deep-seated desire to keep in good standing prevents them from committing the worst outrages in the first place.I sometimes wonder why no group of wise counselors has emerged in SL...people to whom cases are taken..the elders to whom people turn to solve problems...to try to get them to issue rulings. I remember once when much younger, facing a false claim against me by an ex-partner, that I wished to summon up 3 oldbies of good reputation who could review the facts and give an impartial reading, and I couldn't get them to do it -- because they feared retribution, or didn't want to get involved, or figured they couldn't find the facts.The law student is, of course, hardly aware of how difficult it is to find the facts in Second Life! Ask Selena, the Good Teen-Age Witch, and her friend Uri!